Raising both eyebrows. How CV Library’s head of SEO uses leaderboards to drive positive ROI.

Rise lets you become a loved community leader and improve your website’s SEO ranking at the same time.

Rise, the universal scorekeeping service, has now been used many times in a way that has helped brands and organisations to become a well-loved leader of a community and at the same time improve the SEO ranking of the organisation’s website. Examples of this include:

I caught up with CV Library’s Head of SEO, Simon Schnieders, to find out what he thinks of Rise

Why did you create your leader board?

The most recent successful implementation I’ve done has been for CV-Library.co.uk and this was created simply because no industry leaderboard existed, if it had, the question would be ‘could we do it better?’. Better beats first and the ease of implementation, administration and relatively low costs of Rise coupled with a market position which would be agnostic in accepting all qualified players (which I think is critical) can certainly give you that ‘better’ edge.

From an ROI perspective there are a number of factors to desirability – SEO signals (hyperlinks back to the hosted destination page (on your domain)) as a second order effect to the social media impact of a well managed leaderboard. Brand visibility and brand positioning (as an authority), referral traffic and the FGF (feel good factor) that hosting something like this has for our highly valued players, many of whom are also advertisers on CV-Library.

How are you tracking its success?

We use Google Webmaster Tools to track backlinks to the page. It’s a second order effect of social media visibility and the psychological effects of gamification but ultimately that’s the main goal. We also monitor the unique hashtag #ARP100 and both Tweets and Retweets.

How is it going so far?

ROI positive and still raising both eyebrows. Each week we see fresh evidence of success in terms of a blog post from a recruitment agency, a RT or Tweet to thousands of followers and importantly we are haloing feelings of success, achievement and fun from our brand.

Where do you hope to take it?

We’ll segment and include more of the UK recruitment industry to both specialise and broaden reach (e.g the ‘in-house recruitment power 100’) and expand into the US (for Resume-Library.com).

So if you want to follow Simon’s example, how would you do this yourself? It’s easy:

Decide which business community you would like to engage with – CV Library wanted to engage with Recruitment Agencies.

Create a Twitter list of all your community’s members (yes, you will only be able to engage with members who are present on Twitter)

Decide on a name for your community’s Rise board (leaderboard) e.g. Harrow Dentists Power 100 and a unique hashtag: e.g. #HDP100

Once you’ve created and “published” your Riseboard by embedding it on your website, publicise the Riseboard every week by tweeting about it to the community members and by blogging about it. Over a few weeks, you will start being loved and recognised by your community for giving them valuable feedback on their social media influence scores, how they compare to their peers and for helping them create buzz on their own social media channels about their position on the Riseboard. They will also embed links to the Riseboard on your site on their own websites and this will help in your SEO.